Taking the Ironman Challenge to a Whole New Level

31Jan

Around the middle of last year Vrykerion and I came up with the idea for the WoW Ironman Challenge, for players to level a toon without using any type of stat boosting gear or consumables, no talent points, no professions, no glyphs, and no help from friends. Ironsally from Tome of the Ancient was our first Ironman winner, reaching the level cap with a Warlock of unmatched Iron quality.

Today we’re going to talk about a new kind of Ironman, this one going back more to the real roots of what it is to be labeled an “Ironman”.

There’s a new (to me, at least) blog out there called Iron Man Mode that’s collecting donations for the Child’s Play charity. The blog is aimed at having people play video games and blog about their experiences, but with the Iron Man catch – you play, and blog, only until your character dies. Once your character dies, the blog dies with it.

If you would like to donate to the cause of helping children, participate in the challenge yourself, or just help spread the word you can follow this link to get all the details.

8 responses to “Taking the Ironman Challenge to a Whole New Level”

I feel like the Iron man concept is being conflated a little. Isn’t this called permadeath or hardcore mode?
I thought of Iron man challenges as long stretched and laborious, needing lots of motivation to finish, based on real life Iron man triathlon. This, admittedly interesting, challenge is “just” permadeath as I understand it, even though they call it Iron man?

Regardless, I’ve been considering doing the hardcore mode in Minecraft (i.e. permadeath + the world is deleted when you die), maybe I should get going with it.

Firstly, thanks for the shout-out Pynister. I’m pleased to say that thanks to the kindness of folk such as yourself, we ended up smashing that initial $200 charity target within 24 hours, which was nuts! Obviously we’ll keep going with that aspect of it all.

To explain a bit about the background as to why I called it ‘Iron Man Mode’, I first came across the concept in the game Wizardry VIII. It was an actual setting (the first of its kind and the first use of the phrase as far as anyone can tell) and, as Ironyca mentions, is pretty much just the game as usual but with the ‘permadeath’ caveat. The game actually deleted all your save files if the party died.

So that’s where the inspiration came from there; wasn’t aware that there were different definitions or variations… all pretty enlightening and I’ll do a bit more reading (and probably update the FAQ to clear up the confusion I managed to cause!)

My apologies for the late reply, but I’ve been pretty tied up lately with work projects.

I’m glad to see you’ve blown your target goal out of the water, and congratulations on getting linked on some big sites out there.

The first game I fell in love with was Wizardry IV on the NES. It didn’t have the IMM that you’re talking about, but it did have permanent character deaths. You could try to resurrect someone but if it failed you had to use a higher level rez, and if that one failed too then they were completely gone.

In the 80’s it was called Iron Man Mode and involved playing most Sega games. You had one life and went for as long as you could before you either quit or died. Which lead to incredibly long and boring days if you picked the wrong game to Ironman in.

Man, back in the days when the popular magazine was Electronic Games, they had a section devoted to Ironman challenges.